Hot on the heels of the sneak peek teaser, we have the full trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, produced by Michael Bay and directed by Jonathan Liebesman, of Battle: Los Angeles infamy. It opens August 8th. Much as I’d hoped, William Fichtner narrates the entire thing.

The city needs heroes. Darkness has settled over New York City as Shredder and his evil Foot Clan have an iron grip on everything from the police to the politicians. The future is grim until four unlikely outcast brothers rise from the sewers and discover their destiny as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Turtles must work with fearless reporter April and her wise-cracking cameraman Vern Fenwick to save the city and unravel Shredder’s diabolical plan. [JoBlo]

I’m not sure what we get out of this trailer, other than that there’s going to voiceovers about crime and justice and heroes and blah blah blah, all intercut with some incomprehensible action sequences of CGI buildings smashing and inexplicably diagonal horizon lines. Ooh, and fainting. They may not be as faithful to the canon as some would have liked, but you know it’s a throwback when there’s a character fainting. I hope there are also lots of jokes about anchovies and someone partying with a lampshade on their head to really take me back to the 80s.

Yeah, that’s the complaint people have that it’s not retreading the same story. Not the issue of the CGI looking awful, Megan Fox being awful, the turtles being acted by people no one ever wants to see on screen, the explosions on top of explosions, Shredder being played by a fucking white guy, and generally just the bad vibe coming from Michael Bay who has never lived up to even the meager expectations set up for him.

You’re right though, we should all pirate this movie and watch it with friends so we can shit on it properly.

Megan Fox just used “pinnacle of my career” when she posted the trailer for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake to her public Facebook feed. I don’t really know how else to sum up everything wrong with cinema in one sentence.

That was my favorite part of the trailer. I saw a Volkswagen plow into the side of a humvee once and it barely scratched the paint. But of course, everything has to explode here because: Bubbu +32oz soda * explosions= $$$

Soooo … If you pause the video at the right moments … you’ll find that Donatello is wearing fucking NIGHT VISION GOGGLES. Not only in the clip where Will Arnett’s character shows up, but in the snow bunny…er turtle … er … snow burtle? sequence.

I honestly thought about how every superhero story from the 80s and 90s, during the crack days, was about solving crime, and kind of wondered if some of this stuff was updated for today’s inner-city problems if it would be about gentrification.

@Vince Mancini It seems like the “iron grip on everything from the police to the politicians” might be their update. There’s not enough murderers, so the Turtles have to beat the shit out of Charlie Rangel for taking bribes from the Foot Clan.

::Puts on nerd glasses:: April never fainted when she met the turtles. Ernie Ryes jr, did in part 2 and the samurai from the 15th century did in part 3. As a kid I always thought it was funny that the woman, the one who’s always the one to faint in movies, did not, and the men, who never faint in movies ever unless ironically (Clark Kent in the alleyway in Superman 1) do.

Nope instead she let out a scream after waking up on a crappy couch. Then Mikey said “Hi” and made it into a worse scream, then all the Turtles screamed, and Splinter had to come in and put that bitch in check, making all that ruckus I mean shit!

The thing is that the overall look of the design of the turtles is actually not that bad. It’s a neat update from the first film, but the Jim Henson turtle suits actually looked and moved completely believably without calling attention to themselves as rubber animatronics. Ok, I can see some of the mouth movements looking a bit too mechanical here and there, but why couldn’t they just do actual suits for the actors and then maybe enhance some of the more questionable mouth movements with a little CGI to smoothe them out instead of just going full CGI? Spielberg monkeyed a bit with the ET puppet’s mouth articulation in the re-released version of the film and it worked fine without calling attention to itself and taking you out of the film.

I just don’t get this blind reliance on CGI in movies anymore. I mean, I don’t give a shit how photo-realistic the apes in the new Planet of the Apes looked in the new remakes. The minute they started to move they looked appallingly like CGI and didn’t for a minute look like real creatures moving in a world with real physics and gravitational pull. They don’t hold a candle to Rick Baker’s suits in Tim Burton’s version or his other work in Harry and the Hendersons, Gorillas in the Mist or Mighty Joe Young.

Until very recently I would’ve agreed with 100% and probably went into my own vitriol about how much CGI sucks. However, I caught a few minutes of The Hobbit on cable a few months ago during a scene with Gollum and I have to say, I was very very impressed. I actually thought to myself “Ya know, if I wasn’t so against CGI and also didn’t have a keen eye for it, I would honestly have thought this was gool old fashioned puppeteer work”.

I just think that every time a speed-addled executive’s hand reaches for the phone to dial the number of whatever shitty CGI lab is the flavor of the moment whenever a discussion reaches the man-in-a-suit vs. CGI at a proposed movie meeting, someone dusts off a copy of Predator and shows them what talented make-up artists and a world-class performer like Kevin Peter Hall (RIP) can achieve with some rubber and remote-controlled servo motors. Any one scene from that movie shames anything digital that you throw against it when it comes to showing a believable creature move and act as convincingly as any living actor. The scene at the end, where Predator is about to go into hand-to-hand combat with Arnold, and the creature initiates the fight by squatting in a tribal stance and letting out a shrieking roar, is still one of the most bone-chilling moments in sci-fi cinema and it never fails to send a shiver up my spine no matter how many times I watch the film. Go ahead and duplicate that with a bunch one ones and zeroes you CGI-loving tools.

Steve, that is pretty freaking wicked and just proves my point. It’s just really hard to fool a human eye into thinking CGI, even the best kind, looks completely real when held up against actual physical mask or suit. The way the light and texture dance on that kids’ turtle head are so complex and uniquely “real” that it’s like comparing a human mind and the most sophisticated of computer CPUs: a machine cannot replicate an emotional response. Same thing here. The CG looks almost life-like, but doesn’t feel real to a human eye. There is a sense of imperfection that exists in any real-life image that just cannot be duplicated by a computer.
I mean, the best graphics that money could buy like in Avatar and The Hobbit did not fool my mind’s eye that I was looking at something that actually existed in a physical realm. Even the dinos in Jurassic Park, still a gold standard in CGI all these years later (with possibly the most realistic creature movements I’ve ever seen; just look at the way the T-Rex exits her paddoc during the first time you see the full-size creature move) have a slight “off” factor about them when the movie switches from Stan Winston’s stuff to the ILM work.
And the CGI in the Rock’s Hercules movie is just SyFy channel-level abominable. Have the animators in these movies EVER been to a zoo or watch a discovery channel documentary on wildlife? When in the world have they ever seen any animal the size of an elephant move with the speed of a fly? Something the size of the hydra in that Rock trailer would be ripped to pieces by gravitational forces if it ever moved as fast as it does in the trailer. Or at least rendered rendered itself unconscious within seconds of the first time it flew up in the air like a Jack in a box. I know it’s only a movie but if they throw a trillion dollars at the screen to try impress us with the production values, would it kill them to spend a few extra seconds on working out the animal movements with the same care they spend on its texture???

You know I’m not going to complain about Michael Bay “raping” my childhood because at its core TMNT was a story about four mutant amphibians fighting ninja’s. It’s not going to be Citizen Kane, no one said it would be Citizen Kane, so don’t go into the film expecting Citizen Kane.

Something that always bothered me… why do the turtles wear eye bandana things as if they’re trying to remain incognito? This isn’t superman / clark kent… you take the bandana thing off and you still have an 8ft mutant turtle… Okay maybe you can’t tell if it’s Leonardo or Raphael… but they’re not fooling anyone!